


planting words like seeds

by bluebeholder



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Desert Metaphors, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, No Smut, Plant Metaphors, Power of Words, Pre-Canon, Romance, car metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 06:16:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9422168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebeholder/pseuds/bluebeholder
Summary: Furiosa is set to guard the Vault. This wouldn't be so bad, but the words of the Splendid Angharad begin to cause strange things to grow in her heart.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [supergirrl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/supergirrl/gifts).



> You deserve all the nice things. Have some Furiosa/Angharad. <3
> 
> Takes place some time before Cheedo comes to the Citadel (this may or may not fit in with the Ásynjur series). I'm not sure if this falls under any specific archive warnings, so I went with "Choose Not To Use"...

Angharad was bleeding again. 

Her arms were scratched, her legs bruised, and still somehow she managed to look regal dressed only in rage and pain as Furiosa came back into the Vault. Angharad sat atop the steps, with Miss Giddy and Capable soothing her injuries and crooning words of comfort. The Dag rocked in her corner, eyes glittering sharp as bullets as she watched Furiosa’s progress. Toast sat below the other three women on the steps, fists clenched, scowling at Furiosa with every step she took.

It didn’t escape Furiosa that she was an intruder here, unwanted despite the fact that she was a woman just like them. Or—well, not just like them, but woman enough to make her a fitting guard for the Immortan’s prize treasures. Her boots were too loud, sending echoes scurrying for cover as she circled the pool and came to stand at the bottom of the steps.

Toast sprang to her feet when Furiosa reached the steps, staring her down. “Go away, Imperator,” the little wife snapped. She looked ready to throw a punch, and as enraged as she was Furiosa would put nothing past the pugnacious woman. “We don’t want you here.”

“I don’t want to be here,” Furiosa said coolly, letting her gaze pass over Toast dismissively. “But the Immortan would have me ensure the Splendid Angharad’s…safety.”

A crackle of silence passed through all six women. The scars on Angharad’s face stood out like white lightning in the Vault’s gloom, reminders of what she’d attempted before. By the look of her bleeding arms, she’d attempted the same thing again. 

“Don’t call me that, Imperator,” Angharad said. 

Furiosa looked up, feeling absurdly like she was paying tribute to the real ruler of the Citadel. It was a stupid thought: Furiosa held all the power here, and they knew it. That was why she wasn’t welcome. And yet the feeling remained. “You don’t want to be called Splendid?”

Angharad raised her head, looking down at Furiosa with magnificent contempt. “I am not a thing,” she said.

“All right,” Furiosa said. 

There was another moment of silence. In that little space, Furiosa met Angharad’s eyes, perhaps for the first time. The other woman’s eyes were grey, but they shone with a life that belied the exhaustion and agony on her face. It was strange, but Furiosa found contact with those eyes as soothing as cool water in the wasteland.

Miss Giddy rose from Angharad’s side and creaked down the stairs. “Toast, help me find a chair for the Imperator,” she said. “And you, Dag, bring a blanket for Angharad. Furiosa stepped aside and let the History Woman pass, bowing her head respectfully. Miss Giddy reminded her always of a particular phantom who haunted the corners of her mind, whispering of things that were green and growing with a voice like tires on sand.

With bad grace, Toast helped Miss Giddy carry a chair to sit beside the Vault door, while the Dag carried a blanket up and wrapped it around the other wife. Furiosa sat by the door, murmuring a quiet thanks to Miss Giddy for the courtesy as she took the chair. 

“How long are you posted here?” Miss Giddy asked. 

“All night,” Furiosa said. She shrugged. “I’m just here to make sure no one gets hurt.”

Miss Giddy nodded. Between the tattoos, her eyes seemed alarmingly sharp. She had known Furiosa before, when they had lived together in the Vault, but that had been many years and more bullets ago, and now Miss Giddy regarded Furiosa with all the trust she’d give to a stranger. “I don’t trust you, Imperator,” she said, “and I think the girls are right to be afraid. But you keep Angharad safe, and there might be some kind of redemption out there for you.”

Furiosa stared at the History Woman, unable to think of a reply, and took refuge in just looking away like she hadn’t heard a word at all. 

The women whispered together, voices soft and carefully modulated so that Furiosa could never quite make out exactly what they were saying. She paid the snub no mind, instead looking at a manifest that Ace had given her for the War Rig’s projected cargo capacity once they added the new trailer to the damaged cab. Eventually, the generators began to shut down, and the Wives disappeared into their little bedroom together with Miss Giddy. The door shut, and Furiosa was left alone in the dark. 

She put the manifest away and leaned back, resting her head against the wall. The Vault was so silent. It was different than the rest of the Citadel, which never truly slept, where the noise never stopped, where there was always danger. And yet here the silence meant danger, too. It was the silence before an ambush, before a sandstorm, in the hesitation before an engine’s ignition. Maybe it was just the air in the Citadel. The taste of blood in the air might be real, or it might have been Furiosa biting her lip. She didn’t know anymore. 

The door off the Wive’s bedroom creaked and a shadow slipped out into the Vault. Furiosa sat up straighter as the door closed with a soft click and the shadow began to pad up the stairs. “Hey,” Furiosa said, and the shadow stopped. 

“I have nothing to say to you, Imperator,” Angharad said coldly. 

“You don’t get to leave my sight,” Furiosa said without rising. “But I don’t care if you talk to me.”

Furiosa was sure that Angharad was glaring at her, but the woman sat down on the steps and didn’t move or speak for the rest of the night. 

***

And so they came to a pattern. Every day, when she wasn’t working on her other duties as Imperator, Furiosa stood in the Vault and kept her eye on the Wives. Each night, while Furiosa sat guarding the Vault door, Angharad would sit in silence on the steps. And it was strange, as the days crawled slowly by, that Furiosa found herself gaining an odd kind of respect for Angharad. 

While at first the Wives hid their conversations from her, gradually they lost their caution to familiarity. Furiosa was privy to their debate and discourse. She heard about “rights” and “freedom”, about “autonomy” and “personhood”. It was unfamiliar, and Furiosa didn’t care much about understanding it. But even if she didn’t truly comprehend what they were saying, something about Angharad’s speech still fired her, sent her heart pounding like she was driving the War Rig into battle. 

Oh, Capable was eloquent enough. Toast spoke with a dispassionate, irrefutable logic that was strange when Furiosa accounted for her anger and tendency to fight. The Dag flung mysticism and theology about with abandon, and Miss Giddy was a History Woman, versed in every shape and kind of word. But Angharad was different, somehow. Her words had a power about them that would drive men to do terrible things for her, if she wanted. 

But Angharad never directly addressed Furiosa, unless Furiosa spoke first, and even then Furiosa would be lucky if the other woman would give her more than a nod or a curt one-word reply. The more that Furiosa heard Angharad speak, the more she wanted to hear. It was like being addicted to water, only worse, because if you didn’t get water you just died. If Furiosa didn’t hear Angharad speak, she felt that something more than her body would die. 

Furiosa had been a guard in the Vault for two months in this strange drought of words when something finally changed. 

It was night again, and she was by the door. The creak of the door and the slim shadow of Angharad slipping out into the main Vault was expected. What was unexpected was that the other woman came slowly around the pool to sit on the floor in front of Furiosa. In the dim starshine through the skylight, Furiosa could see Angharad well enough. She was looking at Furiosa with an inscrutable expression, as if waiting for Furiosa to start a conversation. But the Imperator said nothing, too surprised to chance speech. 

“If you sit here long enough, you might put down roots,” Angharad said at last, and Furiosa felt each word with the force of a raindrop striking salt. 

“This isn’t my first time in the Vault,” Furiosa said. 

Angharad twitched, as if in surprise, but had the good sense not to ask about that. Instead, she asked, “Why haven’t you asked for another duty yet, Imperator?”

Furiosa shrugged. “Crew needs time,” she said. “Rig got blasted in the last big tangle with the Buzzards. They’ve got to repair it before we can do any more supply runs or war.”

“So instead you sit and keep guard over us,” Angharad said. 

“You,” Furiosa said, looking down at Angharad and feeling ridiculously like all the power in the room was in Angharad’s thin hands right now. “I’m keeping guard over you.”

Angharad gave a sharp, bitter laugh, the sound of an engine knocking. “Because the world would end again if I hurt myself,” she said. “Why don’t you just leave? Let me do what I want. It doesn’t matter to you one way or another.”

It wouldn’t be wise, Furiosa decided, to say that at some point it had started to matter to her that Angharad was all right. “That’s not for me to decide,” she said instead, figuring that it was truthful enough. If she could have decided not to have—feelings—about Angharad, this wouldn’t be a problem.

“You aren’t a thing either,” Angharad said. “You could decide differently.”

“No,” Furiosa said. 

Angharad tilted her head. Her hair, normally kept at least nominally braided, was loose and falling over her shoulders, the same color as the wispy clouds that sometimes drifted over the Citadel without dropping rain. “You puzzle me,” she said. 

Furiosa folded her arms. “Likewise,” she said. 

“You’re an Imperator,” Angharad said. “The best of the Imperators. You drive the War Rig. You have your pick of treasure from raids. You answer only to Joe. Even he might not say anything to you if you defied him. And yet you obey him like you’re just another War Boy.”

“This is why you get hurt,” Furiosa said. “You won’t stop saying things you shouldn’t.”

Angharad drew her knees to her chest. “Everyone should be saying them,” she said softly. “Words have power, like seeds. You plant them, and they take root and grow, and eventually they can even crack stone if they’re nurtured.”

“So you plant them?” Furiosa raised her eyebrows, skeptical even though she was fairly sure that Angharad’s words had planted a garden inside her.

With one finger, Angharad pointed at the small pistol at Furiosa’s side. “It’s better than planting anti-seed,” she said softly. 

The words of a well-loved myth, spoken by another of Furiosa’s phantoms, curled through her head with all the gentleness of a gunshot. _Back then, there was no need to snap anybody_ , the phantom murmured. Furiosa shuddered, banishing the phantom back to the darkness where it belonged. “That was then, this is now,” she said aloud.

Even in the dim light, Furiosa could clearly see Angharad’s puzzled expression. “What?”

“Nothing,” Furiosa said. 

“It was something,” Angharad pressed, and for a flash of a second Furiosa could have sworn that there were crow feathers in her hair.

Furiosa shook her head, banishing that phantom like the others. Why did speaking to this woman bring back all of those things she wanted to forget? “It was nothing,” she said. 

“All right,” Angharad said. There was a pause, and then she said, “You don’t have to hide things from me.”

“There’s nothing to hide,” Furiosa said coldly. 

Angharad leaned back against the wall of the Vault, still looking up at Furiosa. “You’re lying to yourself,” she said. Furiosa didn’t reply. Anything else would just be more lies. 

***

She found herself listening to Angharad, making excuses to stay longer in the Vault. Furiosa tried to sit as close as possible, to better listen to the other woman working out a way to fix their broken world. And it was strange: before, Angharad had never looked at Furiosa. Now, it seemed that Angharad was making every effort to speak directly to her. 

If the Immortan had been a man given to gratitude, Furiosa would have earned all of it. As it was, her already-favored status only grew. She was given her choice of gear and a voice in the Immortan’s war council—though, because she had seen what happened to people who tried to gainsay the Immortan in that council, she was smart enough to keep her mouth shut. And, most importantly, she was left alone with the Wives even more often. Though she was sent out to war often enough, ordered to bring back supplies and guzzoline and treasure and even, twice, a Wife, she was still kept in the honored position of the guardian of the Vault. 

During this time, Angharad fell pregnant. She carried the child with dignity, ignoring the Immortan even as he lavished her with praise for conceiving and threatening her should the child be born sick or a girl. Furiosa couldn’t help admiring Angharad all the more for daring to defy the Immortan even as she carried his child.

Miss Giddy kept her eyes on Furiosa at all times, hovering about and watching to make sure that nothing ever happened. Not that anything would: the Wives were safer with her, Furiosa thought, than they were when the Immortan himself was there in the Vault to “look after” them. 

Every night, Angharad sat by Furiosa. Sometimes they didn’t talk, but those were always the nights after a bad day. Furiosa wasn’t sure why Angharad stayed near her on those nights, when the bruises were still fresh and her face was still tracked with tears, but she didn’t ask. Angharad was not inclined to talk about it. 

On the nights they did talk, Angharad always insisted on asking questions. More often than not, they were questions Furiosa wasn’t prepared to answer. Questions like: “Why don’t you inspire the War Boys to fight back?” “Why don’t you ever refuse orders?” “Why are you so afraid to speak up?” “Would you bring another woman here, if the Immortan ordered you to?”

Furiosa gave back short answers, like: “Because they belong to the Immortan.” “Unlike you, I value my own skin.” “I speak plenty, thanks.” “No.”

Those answers, though Furiosa found them pretty damn good, weren’t enough for Angharad. She would come back, saying things like: “The War Boys are people. They don’t belong to him.” “Do you value other peoples’ skins?” “You only said four words today and you just said them.” “…I didn’t expect you to say that.”

It was that last conversation—six months after Furiosa began to guard the Vault—which was the beginning of the end. “Why didn’t you expect me to say that?” Furiosa asked, a little surprised. What did Angharad think she was, exactly?

“You always obey the Immortan’s orders,” Angharad said slowly, as if sounding out unknown words. “And I know he’s told you to bring back more women. I’ve heard it, since you’ve been our guard. You brought the Dag here, didn’t you?”

“That was a long time ago,” Furiosa said. 

“But you took women for him,” Angharad persisted. 

Furiosa nodded. “One woman, once,” she said. 

“And now you don’t,” Angharad said. She leaned forward, close enough that Furiosa could have touched her if she’d reached out. The proximity was making her head spin like a wheel stuck in sand and she wasn’t sure if she liked it or not. “Why?”

She wasn’t sure how to reply to that. Why didn’t she seize women anymore, when the Immortan commanded it? Why hadn’t she brought a new Wife to the Citadel, when ordered? Why had she let one girl go and killed another, to prevent them from falling into the Immortan’s pudgy hands? Why had she chosen to defy this, of all the orders she’d ever been given? Furiosa knew the answer, but damn her if she was going to tell Angharad why. 

“Furiosa,” Angharad said softly, and Furiosa felt like her body would shake apart, hearing Angharad say her name for the first time. If Angharad was right—if words had the power to make things grow—then something inside Furiosa had just exploded into life at that simple word. And then Angharad went on, and Furiosa felt all her resolve crumbling. “Please. Tell me why. Tell me why you’ve just now decided not to bring back more women. I couldn’t be happier—I don’t want anyone to suffer this fate—but I don’t understand why. I don’t. So tell me. Tell me why I should trust you.”

Furiosa looked away from Angharad, staring at the wall across the Vault. It was safer. “You would hate me if I brought another woman here,” she said.

There was dead silence. 

“If I brought another woman here to suffer like you’ve suffered and like your sisters have suffered then you would have hated me,” Furiosa said.

“You’re right,” Angharad said softly. 

Furiosa didn’t stop. It felt like the gates of the Citadel’s reservoir had been opened and words were pouring out of her, fast as water. “I couldn’t let you hate me,” she said. “I’ve been here for almost seven thousand days, and being around you is the first time that I’ve ever felt hope.”

A cool hand closed around Furiosa’s and the Imperator froze. “You did the right thing,” Angharad said softly. “You did.”

Then Furiosa looked down. Angharad’s hand was wrapped around hers, and the other woman was looking up at her with the same tender expression she normally reserved for her sisters. Furiosa couldn’t think of anything to say, so she stayed still and waited. 

“You did the right thing,” Angharad repeated, one thumb rubbing slow circles on Furiosa’s calloused palm. 

“The only right thing I’ve ever done,” Furiosa said.

“No,” Angharad said, rising onto her knees and coming closer. “You stayed here. You protected us. Those are right things.”

Furiosa didn’t know how to reply. She didn’t have enough words for this. 

“You protect your crew. I’ve heard Corpus Colossus tell the Immortan that you give them too much water. You Witness them when they die, when other Imperators won’t.” Angharad was so close now that Furiosa could practically feel her breathing. 

“Are those good things?” Furiosa asked, searching Angharad’s face in the dim light for some sign of what was going on. Her wheels were spinning frantically, unable to find purchase, and she was terrified.

Angharad’s other hand lifted to cradle the side of Furiosa’s face gently. “You do good things,” she said. “You are a far better person than I credited you with.”

Furiosa couldn’t remember the last time someone had touched her like this. 

And then, without the slightest provocation, Angharad closed the last of the distance between them and kissed Furiosa. 

Her lips were soft and her breath was sweet, while Furiosa’s lips were chapped and she smelled permanently like guzzoline. Angharad’s touch was as soothing as rain and Furiosa drank it in with the thirst of parched earth. She didn’t move, aware that the whole encounter was at Angharad’s pleasure only, content to simply exist. 

After a moment, Angharad leaned back. “I…” she started, as if to justify herself, but Furiosa held up a hand. 

“No,” she said. “Don’t. Just…let it be.”

“All right,” Angharad said, still holding Furiosa’s hand. 

Unbidden, an idea sprang to life in Furiosa’s mind, vining and flowering with promise. Without thinking, she said, “I want to help you escape the Citadel.”

Angharad clapped a hand over her mouth. “You’ll help us?” she said, muffled by her hand.

Feeling the adrenaline charge her like an engine revving up, Furiosa nodded. “Yes,” she said. “It’ll take time. It’ll be a long day and a hard one, but I think we can do it.”

“Good,” Angharad said. She studied Furiosa for a few seconds, then smiled. “If we do this, remember that I trust you.”

“I will,” Furiosa said, hating how stilted her words were, how they fell short compared to Angharad’s living words that planted themselves and thrived wherever they landed. They weren't great words. They weren't words that could crack stone with their power. They were nothing at all like Angharad's words.

But the smile on Angharad’s face said that perhaps Furiosa’s poor words had managed to give life to something anyway.


End file.
